When Approaching a Hero, Proceed with Caution

The East Village's last remaining flaneur, who goes by the name of Brendan Bernhard (not to be confused with Brendan Behan or Bernard Berenson, whose footsteps are heard no more), roams the heat-conductive sidewalks in search of a volume of Proust, only to come upon a cool specter of epiphanies past, an exclusive elusive guitar hero never known for his easy approachability:

And there, standing and kneeling and squatting and peering intently among the racks of marked-down books outside the store, was Tom Verlaine, the ghostly and reclusive leader of the ancient cult-band, Television, erstwhile King of CBGB, and once upon a time, anyway, the absolute Personification of Downtown Cool. Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and dark pants, sheathed in his customary Aura of Solitude, he was instantly recognizable...

Walking straight up to him, I did exactly what I shouldn’t have done and asked him for an interview, knowing my chances of being answered in the affirmative were about 0000.1 percent. Still, I’d interviewed him before, for an hour or so in a coffee shop in Chelsea in 2006, when he last put out a record. Verlaine didn’t remember me, though. “My memory’s just terrible,” he apologized.

One shouldn’t meet one’s heroes, and Verlaine has been one of mine since I was 17. The artist who launches his work into the abstraction otherwise known as the public can have only a vague idea of how it affects people in general, and almost none about how it affects them in particular. What’s unusual about Verlaine is that he seems completely uninterested in the fact that someone might be a fan of his music. Nor does he pretend to be grateful. “More fool, you,” appears to be his attitude. (Or more downtown-cool.)

Still angling for an interview, I told him I had a “surprise” for him.

“You have a surprise for me?”

“Yes, I do,” I replied, firmly standing up to my hero. “I published a Twitter poem about you in The New York Times.”

“You published a poem about me in The New York Times?” he scoffed.

“Yes,” I said, pulling out my iPhone. “It’s on their East Village blog. I’ll show it to you!” And then I started frantically scrolling through The Local’s Web site to find it, cursing the slowness of the connection as Verlaine took advantage of my technical problems by moving slowly and crab-wise away from me, rack by second-hand book rack, toward the thronged anonymity of Broadway. It was humiliating. If my phone ﻿were to ring – I had a piercingly loud Verlaine ringtone – it would be truly humiliating.

But before he could disappear...

I don't want to spoil the suspense, and it would be crass of me, quite unbecoming, to mention that Verlaine also weaves a vapor trail through one chapter of a book I'm too bashful to mention.